Council House of Santa Maria Toluca

This illustrated manuscript records the history and defines the boundaries and landholding titles of a village in the Valley of Mexico. Scholars have dated the manuscript to the early 18th century — a time of frequent challenges to village land titles. Written in Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Mexica people for many centuries, the manuscript’s illustrations reflect the scribe's familiarity with European art. The work is executed on coarse-grained, unsized, cloth-like amatl, paper made from tree-bark fiber common among many pre-Hispanic civilizations. Its views offer powerful evidence for what the indigenous peoples thought about the European-forced dispossession of their ancestral lands. The manuscript provides an important counterpoint to the Library’s significant holdings of works relating to the arrival of Europeans in what we now call the Americas.